It is commonly taught that “God hates the sin but loves the sinner.” Few ever examine, let alone challenge, that statement. Yet not only do we read of God’s hatred toward evil-doers (“You hate all workers of iniquity” [Ps. 5:5]), but we know that it is upon men, not their sins, that God’s hatred poured His wrath. And it is human beings, not their sins, who will suffer forever in hell. Doesn’t it seem wrong, therefore, to say God hates sin but loves the sinner?

“Well, when you put it that way, yes. I guess so. But that creates problems too.” Of course it does. But we must not assert a falsehood or reject truth merely because doing so raises new problems the error (wrongly) avoided.

One evangelical cliché has it that God hates the sin but loves the sinner. There is a small element of truth in these words: God has nothing but hate for the sin, but it would be wrong to conclude that God has nothing but hate for the sinner. A difference must be maintained between God’s view of sin and his view of the sinner. Nevertheless the cliché (God hates the sin but loves the sinner) is false on the face of it and should be abandoned. Fourteen times in the first fifty psalms alone, we are told that God hates the sinner, his wrath is on the liar, and so forth. In the Bible, the wrath of God rests both on the sin (Rom. 1:18ff.) and on the sinner (John 3:36).

Our problem, in part, is that in human experience wrath and love normally abide in mutually exclusive compartments. Love drives wrath out, or wrath drives love out. We come closest to bringing them together, perhaps, in our responses to a wayward act by one of our children, but normally we do not think that a wrathful person is loving.

But this is not the way it is with God. God’s wrath is not an implacable, blind rage. However emotional it may be, it is an entirely reasonable and willed response to offenses against his holiness. But his love, as we saw in the last chapter, wells up amidst his perfections and is not generated by the loveliness of the loved. Thus there is nothing intrinsically impossible about wrath and love being directed toward the same individual or people at the same time. God in his perfections must be wrathful against his rebel image-bearers, for they have offended him; God in his perfections must be loving toward his rebel image-bearers, for he is that kind of God.

There is a small element of truth in this thesis. God always hates sin; he is invariably and implacably opposed to it. And it is true that God loves sinners: God “demonstrates his own love for us in this: While we were still sinners, Christ died for us” (Rom. 5:8; cf. John 3:16). Nevertheless the thesis, with its simplistic antithesis between the personal sinner and sin in the abstract, is mistaken. The same apostle who declares that God’s wrath is revealed from heaven against “all the godlessness and wickedness of men” (Rom. 1:18) also speaks of God’s wrath against individuals (2:5); indeed we are all “by nature children of wrath” (NRSV). The first fifty Psalms repeatedly describe the kinds of people on whom God’s wrath rests, not just the kinds of sin. Indeed, the language can move from God’s wrath to God’s hate and abhorrence: “The arrogant cannot stand in your presence; you hate all who do wrong. You destroy those who tell lies; bloodthirsty and deceitful men the Lord abhors” (Ps. 5:5–6, NIV).

None of this means that God’s wrath is arbitrary or whimsical. In Scripture, God’s wrath, however affective, is the willed and righteous response of his holiness to sin. God’s holiness, like God’s love, is intrinsic to the very being of God; his wrath is not. To put the point another way: God has always been holy, as he has always been love; he has not always been wrathful. But where his holiness confronts the rebellion of his creatures, he must be wrathful (and the entire sweep of the Bible’s storyline insists he is), or his holiness is anaemic. Yet for all that he is no less the God of love.

“(Jesus) is the only one worthy of worship. Folks, we do not worship the family. We do not worship home education. We do not worship patriarchy. We worship Jesus Christ. And as a church we exist to exalt and to worship and to bow the knee and to prostrate ourslelves before the Lord Jesus Christ. We don’t make much of the family. We make much of Jesus. If we get to a place we’re making more of the family or more of patriarchy or more of home education than we are of Jesus, then we are in a place of idolatry. We exist to bow the knee to Christ, to worship the Lord Jesus Christ. We exist to give to Him all that we have and all that we are just as these disciples when they saw the resurrected Christ, recognized that He and He alone was worthy of worship. We don’t worship styles. We worship Jesus. We don’t worship philosophies. We worship Jesus. And that’s who we are first and foremost. We are a people who are hard after God. We are a people who are passionate for Jesus Christ.”

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First Things First

The most important fact necessary before reading this website is to examine yourself to see if you are a Christian. If you are not a Christian, much of this would be ‘Foolishness’ to you.
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1 Cor 2:14 The man without the Spirit does not accept the things that come from the Spirit of God, for they are foolishness to him, and he cannot understand them, because they are spiritually discerned.
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If you are not a Christian then I recommend reading the following:

What is a Berean?

Acts 17:11
"Now the Bereans were of more noble character than the Thessalonians, for they received the message with great eagerness and examined the Scriptures every day to see if what Paul said was true." NIV

My Purpose

Comments

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